The gaze follows a line of trees and tries to visually order near and distant branches. A jumble of lines sketchily leaves behind what is and sketchily captures what can be assembled from the remnants of perception. Hand-drawn lines conquer the third dimension with digital crackling. A pylon waves its tentacles.

After 62 years of marriage Aïcha Soualem is on her own again. Mabrouk, whom she has left, is nevertheless supplied by her daily with food and sugar cubes. Director Lina Soualem is interested in the relationship between her grandparents, who, as the last remaining Algerians in Thiers, France, look back on an eventful past. An empathic investigation all the way back to their native village of Laaouamer which leaves room for ambiguous emotions.

“Soualem” is the password which not only enables Lina Soualem to unlock the tiny, snow-covered village full of cousins in Algeria, which her grandparents left a long time ago. In a sense, “Soualem” is also the title of this gentle investigation of a granddaughter. And Laaouamer, that little place in Algeria, is only the final destination of a long journey which may be narrated via geographical coordinates but interweaves them closely with biographical and emotional ones. Aïcha and Mabrouk rarely talk about themselves. Instead, self-affixed wall badges speak: “The world’s best mom lives here” or “Welcome to the world’s best grandma’s”. To learn more about the couple, whose lives were shaped by French colonialism, Lina Soualem uses private photos and videos. Her investigation is full of love: persistent, but never prying.

This hand-drawn animated documentary provides subtle insights into the patriarchal structures of South Korean society and discusses the roles assigned to women there. Challenged as a restaurant owner and single parent, the director’s mother was helped by the characteristics of her animal zodiac sign: fierce as a tiger, she earned respect. But to her daughter she insisted that she tell nobody about her father’s absence. That is only whispered about.

A young taxidermist is fascinated by crows, paying considerate attention to their dead bodies. Her work on the birds is simultaneously a careful study of anatomical connections and a kind of service toward the resurrection of this mythical creature from the realm between life and death. Through detailed, pulsating black-and-white images and a sparingly intense soundtrack, a charged atmosphere unfolds between craftsmanship, imagination and poetry.

What happens when we digitize our consciousness? We explore a virtual refuge of three-dimensional pixels. Gradually the outlines of a city unfold before our eyes. A choir of memories of its (digital) population is heard, tracing the past. The subjective knowledge of history fades away in a jumble of voices and pixels.

How come the moon is able to pour such equally familiar and mysterious light on the earth it shines on? And why have the countless lunar addicts among international filmmakers been so willingly seduced by this magic power that they set important scenes of their works in the somnambulistic mood between a deeply decadent blood moon and the fresh innocence of the new moon? “To the Moon” is an entrancing ode to one of cinema’s central motifs.

Director Tadhg O’Sullivan, too, surrendered like a hypnotized man to the strange light of the moon and its cinematic supercharge. Using 130 sequences from international film history and enchanting 16mm footage shot exclusively for this project he weaves an immersive meta-narrative in which precisely placed film dialogues, literary “moon passages” and an ingeniously eclectic soundtrack also do their part. Is this where you find your own moon films, with which you were hopelessly struck at a time? Did Tadhg O’Sullivan give due space to “Black Moon” (no), “Suspiria” (no) or “Carnival of Souls” (yes)? Many may ask this. But profound consolation awaits the disappointed ones: Every missing film is outweighed by three others that are so amazing that the loss is easily got over with.

Inspired by the course of the Danube, the European river par excellence, this film drifts from the source to the delta, from the forest of origins to the sea of arrival, both black by name. The water keeps flowing, seasons pass, borders move past and languages change. The images and sounds are the results of a poetic and meditative work which abandons itself to the river’s speed and rhythm. Via encounters and reports, dialects and philosophies, people and landscapes, the grand narrative of a fragmented, torn Europe emerges. But it’s here precisely, along the Danube, that this continent is also marked by the wealth of intertwined cultures.

An added title like a lead weight. Four words from Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel “Malina” set the tone: “There is always war.” Who could ever accept this?! And who hasn’t long since come to terms with it?! “Tremor” is a harsh film in vibrating black-and-white images and a choir of voices from offscreen, as compelling as it is implacable. This continuing meditation on great brutalities, small impositions and omnipresent conflicts takes us to task. But it releases us not into short-lived outrage but into lasting rage. At the end an Afropop song by Jupiter & Okwess International: a song about crying and suffering – and fighting.

While the transaction tax collectors seem to be dancing to jazz music, a pointedly staged text passage by Patrick Chamoiseau lets not only our visual and auditory but also our olfactory senses unfold: The third-largest Nigerian city can be experienced by smell. In this rhythmic portrait of life in Ibadan the urban cinematic poetry is by no means at odds with the profundity with which it captures themes like lack of perspective, globalisation and corruption.

Forty kilometres outside the small town of Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, in the middle of the desert, lies “Spaceport America”, the first private space mission launch centre. People there have been dreaming of tourism in space for the past decade. Hannah Jayanti observes the people of the town who live in the shadow of such great ideas. She tells of tiger bites and scrap collectors, of sparkling stones, of trailer life and how painfully the past still affects the present.

What starts out as a tale about humanity’s great plans gradually turns into one of the dreams and stumbling blocks of human beings. Step by step, the film approaches its characters and unfurls into a reflection of what remains of a life. In addition to documentary and historical footage, the director also uses virtual reality techniques. When the camera travels through 3D simulations of empty streets and houses you feel that something long gone is made tangible again – like an expedition to a ghost town, at a time when the population will have long since left the planet in spaceships. But the created images remain patchy, the objects are captured only in spots, almost as if this was a map of the stars.

An uncle you’re never sure you would like to have yourself but for whom you still shed hot tears when he will have died in the end. The essential material of this touching story – apart from the clay the figures are made of – is empathy. This melancholy farewell to a cranky old geezer deals with a small subject. But it’s about everything.

Celtic cult sites communicate effectively with the cosmos, the terrestrial darkness is churned by energy fields and sunrays. Even in one of his earliest works – a video clip for breakcore pioneer Venetian Snares – David OReilly dissects the myth of a homogenous CGI world, revealing the abrasions of a vulnerable digital DNA.

What’s the parallel between a Leipzig allotment club and the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Greece? Alert to historical lines of connection, outstanding archive material and enchanting images of the austere Cretan landscape, the complex links between silkworm breeding here and German war crimes there are laid bare. The focus is less on settling questions of guilt than on depicting the inner dynamics of war, resistance and forgetting.

A human tragedy on the backdrop of a legal and medical scandal which in 2007 lead to legal action against the Argentinean state before the UN Human Rights Commission and a verdict of guilty in 2011. The mentally and physically handicapped 16-year-old girl Laura had been raped by her uncle in 2006. But a legal abortion which had already been officially granted at the request of her mother, Vicenta, was opposed by lawyers and doctors.

“Vicenta” conveys the details of this truly incredible imposition in the form of a fable in which plasticine figures seem rooted to the spot in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Only the camera moves through this scenery, usually in travellings across the set-up. Very occasionally excerpts of newscasts, broadcast from small monitors on the stage of this “puppet show”, authenticate the narrative. And yet the whole spectrum of conceivable feelings between being openly paralysed with shock and proud self-empowerment of the mother who stubbornly fights for justice for herself and her daughter is conveyed and made comprehensible. In the above-mentioned UN ruling, the Argentinean state was accused of having fundamentally disregarded the recognised right to freedom from inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment in the case of Laura and her mother Vicenta.

Once upon a time there was a young Moroccan man who had a dream, a big dream. And he wanted it to come true, so he thought, somewhere beyond the great sea, perhaps in Estonia. Meanwhile, beyond the sea, perhaps in Estonia, a decadent wedding was being celebrated at the Villa Antropoff. The guests look like Mafia and money-laundering.

An Instagram user surface ripples, turns into a feedback vortex and attempts to impress in virtual space. Every segment is an aesthetically arranged repetition. We catch a brief glimpse of the alleged visual content: in a film studio, equipment and a white background are lurking for their photographic object. Absence is staged as a motif that feeds the vain social media channel.